ABSTRACT
Geographical space is always the realm of the concrete and particular. A new generation of geographers, less parochial than their disciplinary forebears, made the argument that space is more than a passive outcome or container of 'aspatial' processes and relations. David Harvey's signal contribution has been to upgrade historical materialism to historical-geographical materialism by integrating 'the production of space and spatial configurations as an active element within the core of Marxian theorising'. Analysts are faced with so many geographical contingencies, variations and modifications at the start of the analysis that they are forced to wallow in an idiographic morass. Harvey sees G. W. F. Hegel's dialectical method as too static and too committed to mapping an already-constituted 'whole' to be serviceable for his historicalgeographical materialism. Like Harvey, Andrew Sayer's geographical background has disposed him to look closely at the difference that space makes.
